The ability pruning stuff has been remarkably inconsistent across the board, but that goes for many things regarding class design this xpac, I suppose. They're clearly pressed for time and a bunch of stuff just isn't going to get fixed until the next big content patch.
So RIP arms warriors, whirlwind in peace.
Definitely. I feel like they've spent more time telling us what healing should feel like than they have actually making sure they get the specs right.
I think the spirit stuff is great. No complaints there.
I don't like making "smart" healing "dumb" because making heals unpredictable isn't too different from giving them a miss rate. There has always been some of this due to crit, but from a healing standpoint, crits have almost always been a bonus, and not a core function, of the heal. If smart heals have gotten out of hand(and I agree, they have), then tone down the potency of the smart healing effects.
I didn't play the entirety of Cataclysm, but I was raiding at the very beginning of that expansion, and resto shaman felt better than it ever had. That is the definitive smart healing spec, at a time where its smart heals had reached critical mass, and yet I was using my whole toolkit, had to pay attention to my mana, and wasn't falling into anything close to a rotation. By all of their modern metrics of what they want healing specs to be, resto shaman was near perfect 4 years ago.
Now specs have been changed to fit a new philosophy that sounds nice in theory, but these changes were made without much regard to how they affect the spec, and they didn't give themselves enough time to make sure these specs were right. From what I can tell, there are two specs(holy priest and resto druid) that are truly in a good place. Holy paladin and disc priest are powerful but boring, and resto shaman/mistweaver monks are just not ready for live, yet here we are.
Also, Blizzard, being the "mobile" spec is probably too powerful of a niche when your end game requires so much mobility. As long as resto druid is competitive when others standing still, and better while moving, the other specs will only suffer for it. I'm only sticking with shaman over druid this expansion because a) everyone is rolling resto druid because it's a blast to play and really freaking good, b) druid's other three specs are pretty half-baked this time, and c) I've always mained shaman.
